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Real agricultural prices have fallen since 1900, even as world population growth accelerated

Improving agricultural productivity has been the world's primary
safeguard against the needs of a growing population outstripping
the ability of man and resources to supply food. Over the past 50
years, global gross agricultural output has more than tripled in
volume, and productivity growth in agriculture has enabled food to
become more abundant and cheaper. In inflation-adjusted dollars,
agricultural prices fell by an average of 1 percent per year
between 1900 and 2010, despite an increase in the world's
population from 1.7 billion to nearly 7.0 billion over the same
period. Nonetheless, food prices have been rising since around
2001. This has renewed concerns about the pace of agricultural
productivity growth. If productivity growth slows, then more
resources--land, labor, energy, fertilizers, and other
inputs--would be needed to meet rising demand, raising the cost of
food. This chart appears in "New Evidence Points to Robust But
Uneven Productivity Growth in Global Agriculture" in the September
2012 issue of ERS's Amber
Waves magazine.